Author: Dave Gomboc
Date: 21:56:53 06/07/99
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On June 07, 1999 at 20:29:58, Dann Corbit wrote: >On June 07, 1999 at 20:20:25, Dave Gomboc wrote: >[snip] >>At least for the present, it is only an opinion. >> >>Minimax has a way of removing the horrible error in end-point evaluations. It's >>pretty rare that missing an underpromotion will actually hurt you. >In the sample I examined, about 7% of the time it scores lower than always >queening. I can send a list of such EPD's to anyone who would like a copy. Your sample includes only games in which promotion actually occurs, and the 7% includes many positions where promoting to a rook might be slightly better, but if the person playing had overlooked the possibility to underpromote, they could have still won the game my promoting to a queen, either with the same move sequence, or a different one. The important figure would represent how often the rough evaluation of a position (e.g. clearly winning) depends upon a promotion, and how many of these cases there are in which a queen will never work. When you look for this, now you are counting practically every winning ending -- and many winning middlegames -- with pawns on the board that gets resigned. I do not have a statistic to back up my thoughts on this matter, but I am extremely confident that the rate of "necessary underpromotions" will be far less than 7%. 0.0007% would be more like it. Dave
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